The present invention relates to a liquid container equipped with a storage device, an access control method of controlling an access to the storage device mounted on the liquid container, as well as such a storage device and an access control method of controlling an access to such a storage device.
One typical example of the liquid container equipped with the storage device is an ink cartridge. The ink cartridge uses data stored in the storage device to determine whether the ink cartridge is an optimum replacement part for a printing apparatus. One known technique encodes the data stored in the storage device to allow the determination with high accuracy. There is also a technique of making a storage device attached to an optimum member for a host device. This technique encodes data stored in the storage device to enhance the accuracy of determination of whether the member as the attachment target of the storage device is optimum for the host device.
The ink cartridge designed to encode the data stored in the storage device is, however, not applicable to a conventional printer without data encoding capability. In order to deal with this problem, ink cartridges with data encoding capability may be provided separately from ink cartridges without data encoding capability. This, however, undesirably increases the number of different types of ink cartridges as replacement parts, so as to trigger the user's confusion and increase the management cost in the manufacturer.
In the application of encoding data stored in the storage device, a computer without data encoding capability or without installation of an encoding decoding program is not capable of utilizing the data stored in the storage device. In order to deal with this problem, storage devices with data encoding capability may be provided separately from storage devices without data encoding capability. This, however, undesirably increases the number of different types of storage devices, so as to trigger the user's confusion and increase the manufacturing cost and the sales management cost of the storage device